Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1786
“A glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary. O LORD, the hope of Israel, all that forsake You shall be ashamed, and they that depart from Me shall be written in the earth because they have forsaken the LORD, the fountain of living waters. Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed, save me, and I shall be saved: for You are my praise.” Jeremiah 17:12,13,14.
THIS book of Jeremiah is a very thorny one—it might be called, like his smaller work, “The Book of Lamentations.” Our text is as a lily among thorns, as a rose in the wilderness. The solitary place shall be glad for it and the desert shall rejoice. The words sound like sweet music amid the crash of tempest. The bitter tree yields us sweet fruit. The weeping Prophet wipes away our tears. I do not know that the whole of Scripture contains more delightful promises than those which fell from the lips of this son of sorrow who has been to so many a son of consolation! May God grant that this lily, today, may be exceeding lovely in your eyes as you see it in the sunlight of the Holy Spirit.
It seems to me that in this passage the mourning Prophet is sitting alone in communion with his God, speaking out his steadfast faith, and washing the feet of his sorrows in the laver of the promises. The singular change of the pronoun from You to Me shows how near the Lord was to him—so near, indeed, that Jehovah not only speaks by the Prophet, but breaks in with personal language and speaks, Himself All men who have to deal with great multitudes of people for God must be much alone or they will lose their power. Jeremiah was sick at heart, for he prophesied, but he was not believed. He entreated and persuaded, but his affectionate appeals were rejected. He saw the nation hastening to destruction and he could not avert the doom! All this made him cry out in the anguish of his soul, “I am the man that has seen affliction.”
And, therefore, he could not have lived if he had not found sanctuary in his God. He often stole away into secret places that he might pour out his breaking heart before the Lord and commit himself to the tender care of Him whom he so faithfully served. Let us imitate him and overcome our griefs by secret fellowship with the happy God! The passage before us is a very broken one. Those who are acquainted with the original tongue will tell you that it is difficult to construe it. It is a fragmentary passage and several meanings have been given to it. Do you know the reason of this? Should not a broken heart use broken words? When you have been in great trouble and have drawn near to God, you have often had to pour out your heart in faltering accents. Nor does this destroy your prayer, or even shorten its power.
Our God can put our speech together when we cannot put it together ourselves. A sigh here and a cry there—an utterance of faith at one moment and a groan of sorrow at the next—these make up a singular patchwork to ourselves, perhaps. And even more singular, still, to anyone who should overhear us in our solitary sighs. But such supplications are not at all singular to God! He reads the meaning of His saints and understands the language of their sighs. However, it seems to me that the translators of the Authorized Version have given us the true meaning of the original, as I think they generally do. The men are not yet born who will give us a better rendering either of the Old or the New Testament than is to be found in our old English Bibles—and it is my belief that they will never be born!
These men wrote a marvelously pure English and really translated the Bible into our mother tongue, being helped of God not only to see the meaning, but to write it in words which are understood by the people. Learned men in our day, for the most part, know every tongue except English—and they fall into the error of mistaking long Latinized words for our native language. Give me plain expressive Saxon! You may place every confidence in your grandmother’s Bible— whatever small improvements the translation may require—it is in the main so good that its rivals have had but short lives while it retains all its primitive power!
In this text, no doubt, the Prophet had in his eyes the Temple at Jerusalem. Seated upon the summit of a hill, with deep valleys surrounding it, the Temple stood aloft, above all, a noble structure, seen from afar. To the Jew it was, “Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth.” When God dwelt in it, the Temple might be fitly described in the language of Jeremiah as, “A glorious high throne” for God. That glittering Temple of snow-white marble, adorned with abundance of gold, seemed, as it gleamed in the sun, to be the lofty seat of Jehovah, whereon He reigned in the midst of His people. The Temple, I say, may have been in the Prophet’s eyes, but I do not think that it was in the heart of his meaning. The passage which we read just now, in the seventh chapter of Jeremiah, shows you that Jeremiah was by no means a devotee for the material Temple, nor did he rest his confidence in its outward ceremonies.